The Long Walk: Part 1a, More of an Interview with Craig Della Penna

Last week, realtor, lobbyist, and speaker on smart growth Craig Della Penna explained to me how a project like Holyoke's Canal Walk is ultimately a transportation project. It's a project based, ultimately, in Holyoke's roads, and thus has to pass through the same channels of any road construction project: the project goes through the city, the regional planning commission, MassHighway, and the Federal Highway Administration.

Holyoke isn't alone in its Canal Walk taking forever to get built. In fact, whether there's a canal there or just someone trying to pave over a railroad tracks, nearly all road revitalization projects - known as 'Enhancement' programs in highway-department speak - take about this long in Massachusetts.

Why do Massachusetts's enhancement programs take so long? It can be the usual suspects: lack of advocacy, lack of leadership, partly the state and the federal government being cynical. In Holyoke, the more immediate trouble has been in securing easements for property owners adjacent to Canal Walk territory, a task the City is still working on.

But it might also have to do with how transportation money comes into Massachusetts itself. Funding is one of a few things Craig Della Penna and I talk about after the jump.

What could they have done differently when this thing had launched in the nineties - is there something they could have done differently? Was there one particular sign that suggested this was getting started on the wrong foot?

What was missing here was the fact that there were no citizen advocates. They tried to do that, and you can't really have a top-down influence to create a friends group. The friends group has to be created from the ground. That's what I went down [to the Canal Walk meeting, on May 29th] to do, because I've seen now, reaching a critical mass, albeit with outsiders who have come to town investing their own private treasure to try and do something good. And this happened to be next to this canal walk that's taking a long time. The stars were aligned, and I went down there and helped get them going.

What was also missing was this was sort of a Congressman Olver-driven project. Congressman Olver likes this stuff and, God bless him, he brought this big pile of money. In most cases, municipalities chase the money. You've got grantwriters on it, and all they do is try to get money. But he's brought money for the project, and now they're trying to spend it. This is a project that obviously has not been a high priority.

Maybe it's not all the city's fault - MassHighway was very recalcitrant on this stuff, and they're not easy to deal with. The Feds were actually influenced by a right-wing property rights group operating out of the Southwest. And they were developing policy that was not consistent with 49 other states. The Federal Highway Administration is much like Oz in the background. When MassHighway says "We'll get back to you," all that means is 'we're gonna call our federal oversight guys and see if they're going to give thumbs up or thumbs down." So the radical property rights groups targeted the Massachusetts Federal Highway Administration Offices. There was one woman who, over a period of about six years, sent over 600 pages of virulent letters, emails, correspondence directed at the Federal Highway Administration's Massachusetts Division to try and influence them and make it harder for to develop trails.

And that has taken us several years to overturn to get this back in the mainstream.

[There's this popular argument that gets made,] that rail trails will attract pedophiles and rapists. That they're just waiting in the woods to pounce.

Well that's why I'm very effective [in my advocacy]. There's a regional bicycle magazine. In their tenth anniversary issue, they called me the most effective biking and rail-trail advocate.

One of the reasons is because we have a bed and breakfast right next to a rail trail. And I make complimentary room nights available to opponents. I say, 'You know, I happen to know something about this. Because I live eight feet from the oldest municipally-built rail trail.' And I say, 'If you're really fearful about this sort of thing coming into your neighborhood, I'll give you a complimentary weeknight stay at our bed and breakfast along the rail trail. And it has to be a weeknight, because I want you to wake up to the laughter of children biking to school - and how many kids bike to school around here?'

Are there any statistics that back up this idea that crime is more likely to occur on rail trails?

There is a website that teaches these people how to kill off a rail trail in their town. And there's a book you can buy, and I have a copy. Number 1: call it a bike path. That isolates the constituency of people looking at the project and saying, 'Well if it's a bike path, it's probably not for me, because I don't bike anymore.'"

It disqualifies people...

Right. So isolate your users, make the project seem narrow and radical. The book teaches them how to demoralize local trail supporters by videotaping their meetings. Intimidating public officials - it teaches them how to do this.

They have about 900 pages of instances of rape and murder and robbery on trails. And it dates back thirties. And I say to them: 'That's all you can find?' If you add in sidewalks, if you add in churches, you're probably more instances of this stuff.

[...] The Rails to Trails Conservancy did a survey across all of the United States trails ten years ago, and talked to the trail managers about what their experience was with crime along the trails, and it was very much telling that if the community had a lot of crime, they may have a lot of crime on the rail trail. But they'll probably have less, because the rail trail will have enough eyes on it that these bad guys aren't going to go to it.

You talked about the Federal Highway Administration's behind-the-scenes role about getting some of these projects terminated. What are their financial priorities?

Well, the federal government has set aside 10% of all transportation dollars for the enhancements program [or the Transportation Enhancements program, which is the branch of the Federal Highway Administration that deals with developing or restoring bikepaths, historic highways, railroads, canals, etc.]. There 13 categories [in enhancements funding], and one of those categories is for building bike paths and rail trails. Sometimes it's a restorative transportation museum, made from an old railroad station - billboard removal is one of the categories, just to make things nicer.

The money coming out of the Federal Highway Administration given to every state comes in columns of money - road and bridge program; federal aid program; non-federal aid program; enhancements program - coming into all the DOTs [Departments of Transportation], then coming out of the DOTs to the local region. They don't come directly to the cities, the come to the region, so the region can vote on their priorities for projects.

When you say 'region', do you mean the counties?

Well, it used to be counties, but in the context of today, this would be, in our area today, the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission. That's one of 12 or 13 planning commissions or metropolitan planning organizations that vote on the transportation priorities of that region. So MassHighway gets the big lump of money in the feds in all the columns. In every other state in the United States, or maybe 45 states out of 50 - 46, 47 - it still comes out of the DOT in those columns to the regions, albeit much smaller for the region.

However, in Massachusetts, the money coming out of the MassHighway is lumped together coming to the region. Then the region has a transportation policy setting committee and they look at what their projects are and what bridges are falling down. And in Massachusetts, since all that money is lumped together, and they say, you can vote for these enhancements programs that exist, too, but you don't really have to. Because this is all we have. And typically -

--They just don't think of embarking on projects like a canal walk?

That's right.

Because there aren't specifically-designated funds for the project.

Right. But in the Pioneer Valley, this region does good in that regard. There are a number of projects that are coming forward right now. As a matter of fact, the most recent groundbreaking here was in Southwick. It started in 1995. It was a project that was led forward, spearheaded by local middle school students. And here it is now, all these years later, they're in their twenties, some of them have families, they were at the groundbreaking, talking about how long it takes to do projects like this. This was not a project that was shepherded along by municipality, or the state. School kids were the advocates in getting the state rep. [...] The Selectmen came along reluctantly.

So is the difficulty with the Holyoke Canal Walk partly that just came from the top down as opposed to from the ground up?

Right.

What did you make of the meeting on Thursday [May 29th]?

I know that some of the participants were disappointed. You should talk to Nancy Sachs. She's the leader of the group. What I saw there was completely expected from my point of view. This was going to be a presentation that was very low-tech, very much without any kind of supporting documents or take-home literature. It was not going to be very sophisticated. And that's what we saw. Holyoke doesn't have a lot of experience with citizen advocacy groups to partner with them.

Given your background in transportation and with all of this, what do you make of the state of Massachusetts's working class? When you see a city like Holyoke, is that a city that can be re-industrialized?

Yes. With the greening of America finally starting to take place, one of the amazing things I find about Holyoke is that it really has no viable rail customers. There's a move there that actually has gotten an award in the railroad industry for creative marketing. Holyoke Gas & Electric has a lot of unused steam capacitors because a lot of the mills are closed.

So, they have unused capacity. And there's a move where they bring in unit trains of wax for Yankee Candle. And they heat up wax - these are specialized rail cars that are plugged in with steam - the steam circulates, warms up the wax, melts it, transloads the trucks that are already warm. Then they take it up in refrigerated thermos bottles to Yankee Candle.

Which is ironic because years ago, there was a guy in South Hadley who started the Yankee Candle business in a cellar and garage or something, and he went to the mayor of Holyoke and said, 'I got a great idea, mayor. I'm going to start a candle making business and I want to cite it in Holyoke in one of these old mills.' And the mayor said: 'Bah, kid, get out of here, we want real jobs.'

When they say 'real jobs,' what do they mean?

Well, in that context of the 1970's, it meant worker jobs in mills. And candles weren't seen as a good thing to get attached to - paper mill jobs, they're coming back, we just have to wait them out! That was the thinking!

Where the police station is now, just down the stream on the canal, there was a company, Hart Wool Combing. That was a typical industrial job in Holyoke, which meant they would get rail cars of shared sheep wool, bundled into the car. The cars were unloaded on specialized forklifts, broke open the bands, dumped into these vats of water and washed, flushed [the sheep manure and the water] into the canal, wash it again, get it as clean as they could, then it would go upstairs and work its way down again, [...] and eventually spun into wool. The tightening environmental rules said that you couldn't just be flushing sheep shit into the water. So the mill closed down.

It's like that all over: the environmental rules tightened up, so that it wasn't economically sound for those mills. Today, they have started to a degree to make these mills available for entrepreneurial uses - and it's starting to come. It hasn't reached a critical mass yet in Holyoke, but I think you'll see that. And I think the fact that the Gas & Electric now controls the assets of the old Holyoke Water Power Company [...] is good. And, I think Holyoke will enjoy a renaissance.

People who I've said that to sometimes look at me like I'm crazy. But all this stuff in tertiary-sized cities will. You see what's going on west of us, in Worthington, to a degree Williamsburg, and further out, Cummington and Chesterfield. Those places are harder and harder to sell. Nobody wants to spend two tanks of $4-a-gallon gas to get to work.

We're going to have to have a martial plan of epic proportions to make it easy for people to come back into the cities and to have a closer-in urban development. I'm not talking about, you know, ethnic cleansing - I'm talking about truly functioning diverse communities that work. It will happen. It will have to happen. [...] But if you want to bring transit back to the masses, it's not on rubber-tired buses. It's on steel rails.